


Lemon Cakes and Apple Pie

by alienor_woods



Series: We're Going Down [3]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Gen, Modern Royalty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-02
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2019-07-06 01:13:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15875454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alienor_woods/pseuds/alienor_woods
Summary: Sansa bakes when she can't sleep. It’s past midnight, what Old Nan used to call the witching hours, and the rest of the castle is quiet as a mouse. With rooms dim corners and the oven warming up behind her, she feels quite…cozy.While the rest of Winterfell slumbers, Jon and Sansa pass their time in the kitchens.





	Lemon Cakes and Apple Pie

**Author's Note:**

  * For [just_a_dram](https://archiveofourown.org/users/just_a_dram/gifts).



> Set about a year before the events of [As Long As We’re Going Down.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15528450/chapters/36046599)

Sansa bakes when she can’t sleep.

 

There’s something about the rote practice of measuring out ingredients, mixing them together, pouring them out that calms her mind to a low hum. And Winterfell’s kitchen is a nice place to spend time in at night anyway, all dark granite countertops and cherry cabinets. It’s a huge space, large enough to prepare food for the whole household in addition to the family, so she only has a few recessed lights on over the center island. It’s past midnight, what Old Nan used to call the witching hours, and the rest of the castle is quiet as a mouse. With rooms dim corners and the oven warming up behind her, she feels quite…cozy.

 

The batter in her bowl turns smooth and frothy under her whisk. She’s making lemon cakes, a recipe she knows so well that she could whip up ten dozen in her sleep. She’d worried that she’d forgotten it. She remembers that she’d once asked Cersei what she was planning to bake for Myrcella’s birthday, and the older woman’s laugh and dismissive, _queens don’t work in the kitchen, sweetling_.

 

But she’d drifted down to Winterfell’s kitchens like a ghost the first week she was back, and the motions had came to her as easily, as if she’d never had to stop making them. Sansa thanks the gods that _this_ is one thing the capital hadn’t stripped away from her.

 

She rummages through a drawer and pulls out a microplaner, then sets a lemon to it, turning it once or twice to get a better grip on it. The zest drips down into the batter, settling onto the surface like a flat little island. For a few moments it’s only Sansa and the quiet hum of lemon, cinnamon, and nutmeg against the microplaner until she hears footsteps headed towards the kitchen. The rest of the family is abed and non-essential staff was dismissed hours ago. She sets down the nutmeg seed and eyes the hall from the Keep, fingers resting on the pull of the knife drawer.

 

It’s Jon, and he starts a bit when he steps through the arch into the massive kitchen. The collar of his peacoat is turned up, and his cheeks are pink from the cold outside. “Sansa—Hey. I didn’t think anyone would be awake.”

 

Sansa glances at the clock. 12:45 A.M. He pulls out a chair at the long family table and drops his duffel onto the seat before he walks straight to the fridge and rummages for a beer.

 

“I couldn’t sleep,” Sansa explains, setting the microplaner aside and sweeping her whisk around the edges of the bowl to fold the zest and spices into the batter.

 

“What are you making?” Jon peeks over her shoulder as he retrieves a bottle opener. He smells sharp and clean, like he’s just been hit with a blast of winter wind. Her nose catches the slightest note of near-faded cologne. “Ah, of course. Lemon cakes.”

 

“You say that like you won’t eat them when I’m done.” Sansa gives him a small smile and sets the bowl aside. “Training camp was good?”

 

Jon huffs a short, bitter laugh and returns to the table to collapse into a chair and scrub at his face. “It was great until I told Ygritte that I’m staying with the Night’s Watch in Winterfell,” he finally says, rocking his beer bottle around on the circular edge of its base.

 

She peeks at him from the corner of her eye when he doesn’t elaborate, and from the downward turn of his mouth and his creased forehead, she guesses that Ygritte didn’t like that news at all. The Night’s Watch trains with the border patrol Beyond the Wall from time to time, and that’s how Jon met Ygritte a year ago. She’s been pressuring him to move north of the Wall and move in with her, maybe even join the border patrol, too, but in the end, Jon’s decided to stay in Winter City and with the Night’s Watch.

 

Or, that’s what Robb’s told his sisters, anyway. _I’ve only talked to her on the phone_ , Robb had said with a smirk playing around his lips, _but if she’s even half the woman she’s made out to be in Jon’s stories, and if he wants to come back home with all ten fingers and toes, he’d best tuck tail and run as soon as he tells her._

 

Jon takes another swig of his beer and traces the grain of the witchwood table. He seems to need the quiet just as much as she does. Sansa keeps working the batter, then steps away to slide open the pantry’s pocket door and pokes around until she finds the muffin pans. When she’s back out, Jon’s awakened from his thoughts and has pulled a sharp knife from the very drawer Sansa had been reaching for moments before. Sansa passes him the bowl of lemons and he slices them thinly while she butters the muffin tins.

 

Carefully, he drops a lemon slice into the bottom of each tin, eighteen in all. He grew up at Winterfell; he knows the broad outlines of Sansa’s favorite dessert, even though he’s not as devoted a fan as Bran or Lord Stark. Sansa follows him with the batter, ladled cleanly into each tin. Her mother had used a plain measuring cup when Sansa was a girl, but the drips on the counter had set little Sansa’s hair on end.

 

“I see you haven’t lost your touch,” Jon finally says, watching her fill the tins precisely two-thirds full with clean movements.

 

Sansa lifts a shoulder, keeping her eyes on her work. “They wouldn’t let me cook or bake at the Red Keep. So I had to give the recipe to the chefs there, but they never got it quite right. They were always too heavy, too sweet, or too crispy. Now that I’m home, I just…can’t seem to stop craving them.” Her chin quivers suddenly, and she clears her throat and pulls the corners of her mouth into a slight smile. “Strange, but delicious, huh?”

 

But Jon doesn’t chuckle along with her. Instead, his beard twitches where the muscle in his jaw jumps, and he picks up his beer by the neck. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought that up.” Sansa sees his lips pull to the side before they’re covered by the mouth of the bottle. She knows that he’s wishing he could take it back.

 

Everyone does that. Tiptoes around her, triple-weighs their words before they speak, fearful she’ll snap and end up just as bad as Lord Stark.

 

“It’s fine, Jon. Really.”

 

She slides the three pans into the oven and sets the timer. Forty minutes. Forty minutes of King’s Landing memories, of Joffrey’s scoff when she’d asked for lemoncakes instead of tiered cakes for her namedays, and of Queen Cersei’s hidden smirk and her sugarysweet _how rustic, little dove._ Jon’s frowning at his empty bottle, peeling the label away from the glass, so she clasps her hands together and fixes him with a hopeful smile. “What can I bake for you?”

 

His eyes flicker to hers. She sometimes wonders if she’d be better able to pick apart his facial expressions if he didn’t have a beard. All of her skills in reading people she’d picked up in King’s Landing don’t work as well on Northmen, who keep their beards to guard against the cold. “You don’t need to worry about making anything for me,” he tells her.

 

“Oh, please. I have to wait for the lemon cakes to come out anyway.” Sansa collects the empty mixing bowls, measuring cups, and ladle and places them all in the sink while Jon stays quiet. “And you’ve had a long drive, right? And you and Ygritte…well, I just think that desserts make everything better, don’t you?”

 

His eyes are softer when she turns around. His mouth doesn’t look so harsh under his mustache. “Apple pie?” he finally asks, and Sansa laughs. That surprises him. “What? Is that wrong?”

 

“It’s nothing,” she reassures him a minute later, appearing from the pantry with a bowl of apples under her arm. She sets it in front of him and tells him, “You’ll just have to peel them while I mix everything else up.”

 

Sansa fetches a fresh mixing bowl, sets the lower oven to preheat, and runs her finger along the spine of cookbooks until she finds her mother’s favorite. She’d brought it with her when she’d married Ned decades ago, and Sansa has no doubt that if anyone has a good apple pie recipe, it’d be whichever Riverlander put this cookbook together.

 

“No recipe memorized? I’m surprised,” Jon teases. He turns an apple deftly in his fingers, the peel pulling away under the paring knife in a neat coil.

 

“I’m not really a pie person,” Sansa says. “Not fruit pies, at least.”

 

“How can you not like pie?” He asks, with brows hiked high on his forehead. He’s so astonished that he pauses in his work. “It’s…warm and flaky and—“

 

“—and gooey and messy,” Sansa finishes with a teasing smile, measuring out the spices together in the bottom of the big mixing bowl. Jon huffs, says _that’s the best part_ , especially when smushed together with ice cream, hot and cold at once.

 

In the interest of time, she ignores the cross-referenced homemade crust recipe and instead pulls a storebought crust from the fridge. It’ll work just as well. But she can’t help herself from adding a _little_ bit of homemade love. While Jon chops the apples and mixes them with the spices and melted butter Sansa has prepped, she rolls out a second crust and slices it into ribbons.

 

Rickon likes pies, too, and she’s always loved making latticework for her littlest brother’s treats. It’s easy, once one learns the pattern, but Jon still whistles appreciatively and bumps her shoulders when she weaves the strips together and pinches off the ends, leaving just enough to flute the outer edges. She’s not totally sure it’s the heat from the oven that makes her cheeks flush.

 

Jon’s pie goes in just as the top oven beeps at her. Her lemon cakes come out perfectly done, as usual. While the they cool and the pie bakes, Sansa and Jon sit side-by-side at the counter, chattering about nothing of special note. Jon talks about Ghost and this new dog park he’s found on the east side of Winter City. He talks about Samwell Tarly and Sam’s on-off girlfriend, Gilly, and how Sam’s already looking at rings after only six months of back-on dating, overbearing father and all. Sansa talks about the charity ball in White Harbor she’d attended the week before and the new food bank and soup kitchen she’s trying to set up with Alys Karstark. It’s been hard finding available real estate close to where the homeless congregate in Karhold, but she and Alys are determined to keep looking.

 

Jon doesn’t talk about Ygritte, and Sansa doesn’t ask.

 

Sansa doesn’t talk about King’s Landing, and Jon doesn’t ask.

 

“Lemon cake?” she offers, once they’ve cooled down. She’s let her hair fall loose from her clip now, and taken off her apron, ready to enjoy the treats she’s baked. He nods, so she serves up one for each of them on small plates. He takes a bite, his apprehension fading into appreciation. “I don’t use as much sugar now,” she informs him, and he graces her with a short laugh.

 

“They could have put someone into a diabetic coma back in the day,” he jokes drily.

 

The cake is zesty and tart on her tongue, and she chews fully and swallows before she answers. “Papa always said that if I ever killed anyone, I would kill them with kindness.” Jon shakes his head and pops the rest of the lemon cake into his mouth. His mood has lightened considerably from when he first burst into the kitchen tonight.

 

Or rather: this morning. The clock on the wall reads 3:30 by the time his pie is done baking. Jon keeps sneaking peeks at it for the whole ten minutes that she insists it has to rest. Sansa has to admit that it does smell nice and spicy. When she pulls it from the oven in two mitted hands, Jon tells her it’s the prettiest apple pie he’s ever seen.

 

“You aren’t going to cut yourself a slice?” he asks, when she serves him a plate.

 

“Like I said—gooey, messy.” She shakes her head, her red hair making lazy waves around her shoulders, but she comes back to sit next to him at the island while he eats.

 

She sets her chin on her fist and watches him lift the first bite to his mouth, and feels a burst of pride when his face melts into bliss. “This is amazing,” he says, mouth full. “Really. Sansa, just try a bite.”

 

“No, no—it’s yours! I trust you that it’s good.”

 

Jon scoops up a careful ratio of crust and filling and holds the fork out for her. “Don’t you want to taste what you made?”

 

Yes, she _does_ , she realizes. Baking it is joyful enough for her, but to join in his happiness as he eats what she made him is what would make her night complete. It helps that Jon’s expression is earnest, free of the typical tells of lies and artifice. It’s ridiculous, but in this moment she _really_ wants to hug him.

 

Instead, she takes the fork from his hand and slides the prongs into her mouth. And yes, it’s gooey, it’s _messy,_ but the apples still have a firmness to them, a lovely echo of their raw crisp-snap, and they’ve gone all warm and spicy as they’ve baked. “It’s nice,” she says, unable to keep the surprise out of her voice, and Jon gifts her with one of his rare grins.

 

“See? You could be a pie person, if you’d just let yourself.”

 

“Oh, goodness, now you’re going to try to convert me,” Sansa demurrs, and rises away from his soft smile to cover their desserts with foil. She writes Jon’s name on his pie before she puts it into the fridge, and she leaves the lemon cakes on the counter with a smiley face drawn on the top.

 

She moves towards the sink full of soiled bowls and messy utensils, but the yawn comes on before she can catch it. Jon stops her with a hand on her arm, and shakes his head when she insists she has to wash up. “Go on up to bed, Sansa. I’ll clean up in here.”

 

“Miss Bea—”

 

“Don’t worry about Miss Bea,” Jon reassures her with a soft, conspiratorial smile. His hand lingers on her arm, his eyes take in the sleepy blink of her eyes. “I do know how to run a dishwasher, I promise.”

 

She makes to protest, but Jon’s not having any of it. He’s been chugging coffee all night on the road, he tells her, and he’s probably not going to sleep for hours yet.

 

“You’ve worn yourself out, huh?” Jon says. “Just like you wanted to. Go on. It’s my turn to wear myself out, now.”

 

So she lets him pull her into his arms and press a chaste kiss to her hair, pretends not to hear his whispered _I’m so glad you’re home_. He’s pushing up his sleeves when she leaves, and she has to push down her urge to stay and help one last time.

 

But Jon Snow isn’t Bran or Rickon; he’s not a teenaged boy who is going to thoughtlessly cut corners to finish faster. He’s a man, a grown man with broad shoulders unafraid to lean into the scrub of a muffin tin. So, she leaves the kitchen and pads down corridors, up this stairwell, up this other one, down this other hall, until she ends up at her bedchamber, where she flips back her sheets and crawls beneath the covers.

 

It does taste good, she thinks hazily, the mix of lemons and apples on her tongue

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, make sure to check out the rest of [the series.](https://archiveofourown.org/series/69155) And leave a comment to let me know that you enjoyed it!


End file.
